Minecraft 1.13 and 1.14 – latest news

Announced this week, a fairly big change to release schedule of both Minecraft 1.13 and 1.14; more specifically everything planned for 1.14 is now being blended into a major 1.13 update. That means the planned technical release of 1.13 and the Update Aquatic release planned for 1.14 will all now be released together in the same, massive update. This means 1.13 will be known as The Update Aquatic. Got it?

There’s an upside and a downside of course. Sadly this does mean that the eventual release date will now be that much further away, as there’s so much more content and updates to refine. Conversely that does also mean we will be able to get our hands on snapshots with Update Aquatic content much sooner.

We’re going to hold back the official launch of 1.13 and merge that release with all the features we’d planned for the Update Aquatic. But, in a weird twist, this delay means you’ll actually get to play with cool Aquatic features earlier. Let me explain!

As you may have heard, this year we have some pretty big things planned for Minecraft. Pretty big, pretty wet things, in fact, all bundled into the suitably soggy-sounding Update Aquatic! This’ll bring you all kinds of submarine marvels, including turtles, dolphins, coral reefs, deep sea vents and other mysteries of the abyss.

But before we get to all that, we were planning on releasing the rather technical 1.13 update, which includes equally exciting-sounding things like a new world format, a new command parser, data packs and the elusive rewrite of world generation. Woah, woah, settle down! I know you’re crazy for command parsers, but let’s not lose a sense of decorum.

Most of this stuff is already in the latest snapshot (along with some fun but definitely unstable things that we don’t plan on ever officially supporting – like the debug sticks you can see in the picture above, which let you change a block’s state when you whack it). However, because our world generation overhaul is taking a little longer to get ready, we’re going to hold back the big 1.13 release and put it out at the same time as the Update Aquatic. In fact, the Update Aquatic will become 1.13!

As a result, however, this means we can actually start snapshotting Update Aquatic features much earlier than previously planned! Lucky you!

So, get ready to take a dip… soon… ish!

This comes hot on the heels of a couple of interviews with Jen, here and also here where the following additional points about the Update Aquatic were confirmed:

* Ocean biomes will not generate in already explored worlds. You’ll need to reset your map or generate new chunks to discover the new Update Aquatic ocean biomes

* While world gen is being recoded, but that doesn’t mean any dramatic changes for the player. The core changes are to allow players to use JSON files to customize their world’s generation, e.g. you’ll be able to include what kind of structures you want to spawn and where, and even add new structures – all in vanilla!

* No penguins, though they were on the list at one point. Turtles and dolphins will arrive in 1.13 for sure, but there’s a chance that penguins will join them at a distant date.

* There will be different types of shipwrecks to discover in the Update Aquatic release.

* The whole planned changes to water physics may no longer happen. Jeb indicated some concern about breaking contraptions that rely on existing game mechanics. The main goal seems to be allow for water to flow through fences though.

* There are no current plans for an API on the Java edition for modern.